June 27, 2005
Court Jesters
The Supreme Court releases a pair of utterly irreconcilable decisions...
In it's anticipated avalanche of rulings, the United States Supreme Court has rendered decisions regarding displays of the Ten Commandments in two cases that are likely to leave the country head tilted with a collective "Huh?"
In the worst of all possibilities, the court has decided that there is an inherent problem with the display of the Ten Commandments in McCreary County v. ACLU, except where there is no intent to display them as a religious device as in Van Orden v. Perry.
Surely they jest...
Are we all talking about THOSE Ten Commandments? The Commandments given by God to man written in stone tablets? Religious device? How on earth can a display of tablets etched by the finger of God be anything BUT a religious device? Are we to pretend we don't know or understand the source of the writing, as if it were the product of infinite monkeys with infinite chisels? For crying out loud, the very first one is "I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other Gods before me".
Now, this of course didn't escape some of the Justices - John Paul Stevens of course sees the very first commandment as rendering the entire set as a religious document - and he is correct. He is also, of course, as looney as a moonbat for advocating that the display of this text on public grounds is an establishment of religion forbidden by the First Amendment. There is a clear difference between acknowledgement of religion, and advocacy of religion. Showing the code of laws upon which nations of Western Civilization have based their moral and legal codes for thousands of years is no more an establishment of religion than the State putting in a bike path is an establishment of a requirement to learn to ride a bike.
In the end, this case is likely to be a mere placeholder until the court swings left or right - basically, that the court reserves the right to decide piecemeal when a display of anything with a religious connotation or source is "too" religious.
This is a sad state of affairs, how badly mangled the First Amendment to the Constitution has become. Let us read the first clause together:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;"
This has been tortured to mean that the public square must be purged of any acknowledgement of religion - lest we be seen establishing that there is religion, much less any particular one. Now how this group of purportedly wisened folk can read these words - a clause regarding the Congress using it's Legislative authority to establish a religion or prohibit the free exercise of religion - to decide that a courthouse cannot display a copy of the Ten Commandments is, like their decisions today, beyond comprehension.
There is no tenable connection between the purpose of the First Amendment and how it is used today to move God away from the center of American life and replace it with the State.
Posted by MEC2 at June 27, 2005 10:40 PM